The first time I was around more than a few Ivy League types, I was excited! I thought, Finally, around my people…smart people who can hold a conversation about anything.

I was so, so wrong. So very wrong. I thought most Ivy Leaguers, in my ignorance, would be like Will Hunting. They were more like a Will Ferrell character. Not all of them, to be sure. A few had little sputtering candles of intelligence, though no what I now call systems thinking abilities to speak of.

But I was so disappointed. Truly I was. This was when I was 24 or so and working at a company with a bunch of highfalutin types. I didn’t really have any idea then that the Ivy League and its near-proxies consisted primarily of three classes: 1) legacy mediocrities; 2) those who were good at memorizing textbooks with loads of ambition and no lives who only knew what was in those textbooks; 3) near-autistic STEM types who were ridiculously talented at one tiny area but could otherwise not tie their own shoes.

I should have guessed from my experiences in so-called gifted classes, but as I said, like Fox Mulder, I wanted to believe.